Form Widget Kudos

[Adrian Crum]

I just spent the last two days working closely with the form widget and I'd like
to take the time to offer my appreciation and admiration to its author.

At first I didn't care for it because it produced a very simplistic form. After
digging into the HtmlFormRenderer.java code, I discovered it has tremendous
styling ability that isn't used by default. So, if you take the time to create a
decent form widget CSS style, then you can get the form widget's output to look
quite fancy.

One glaring omission in HtmlFormRenderer.java - there is no way to specify a
style for the layout table it contains. Otherwise, it's an awesome piece of code.

-Adrian

[Leon Torres-2]

Quick and dirty way to accomplish this:  Wrap your form call in a <container
id="something">

Then you can use CSS selectors to select that particular form table:

#someting table {}

I think we do this trick in crmsfa, where the form widget is probably most
intensively used.

Cheers,

- Leon

Adrian Crum wrote:

> I just spent the last two days working closely with the form widget and
> I'd like to take the time to offer my appreciation and admiration to its
> author.
>
> At first I didn't care for it because it produced a very simplistic
> form. After digging into the HtmlFormRenderer.java code, I discovered it
> has tremendous styling ability that isn't used by default. So, if you
> take the time to create a decent form widget CSS style, then you can get
> the form widget's output to look quite fancy.
>
> One glaring omission in HtmlFormRenderer.java - there is no way to
> specify a style for the layout table it contains. Otherwise, it's an
> awesome piece of code.
>
> -Adrian
>
>

[Adrian Crum]

Leon - that's a good tip! Since I was already in the java code doing cleanups, I
just hardcoded it to use a "basicTable" style - which is in my style sheet. I'd
like to get some help with converting that to a parameter though.


Leon Torres wrote:

> Quick and dirty way to accomplish this:  Wrap your form call in a
> <container id="something">
>
> Then you can use CSS selectors to select that particular form table:
>
> #someting table {}
>
> I think we do this trick in crmsfa, where the form widget is probably
> most intensively used.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Leon
>
> Adrian Crum wrote:
>
>> I just spent the last two days working closely with the form widget
>> and I'd like to take the time to offer my appreciation and admiration
>> to its author.
>>
>> At first I didn't care for it because it produced a very simplistic
>> form. After digging into the HtmlFormRenderer.java code, I discovered
>> it has tremendous styling ability that isn't used by default. So, if
>> you take the time to create a decent form widget CSS style, then you
>> can get the form widget's output to look quite fancy.
>>
>> One glaring omission in HtmlFormRenderer.java - there is no way to
>> specify a style for the layout table it contains. Otherwise, it's an
>> awesome piece of code.
>>
>> -Adrian
>>
>>
>

[Adrian Crum]

Leon,

Quick question: in crmsfa, did you use that trick to style just the table or all
of its elements too? The reason I ask is, I modified the form renderer to only
use the <span> element when a style is specified in the xml file, otherwise the
element just appears in its container.

Example:

Existing form renderer outputs

<td width="20%" align="right"><span>First Name</span></td>

My modification outputs

<td>First Name</td>

I'm concerned my improvements might break your styling, should they make their
way into the project.



Leon Torres wrote:

> Quick and dirty way to accomplish this:  Wrap your form call in a
> <container id="something">
>
> Then you can use CSS selectors to select that particular form table:
>
> #someting table {}
>
> I think we do this trick in crmsfa, where the form widget is probably
> most intensively used.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Leon
>
> Adrian Crum wrote:
>
>> I just spent the last two days working closely with the form widget
>> and I'd like to take the time to offer my appreciation and admiration
>> to its author.
>>
>> At first I didn't care for it because it produced a very simplistic
>> form. After digging into the HtmlFormRenderer.java code, I discovered
>> it has tremendous styling ability that isn't used by default. So, if
>> you take the time to create a decent form widget CSS style, then you
>> can get the form widget's output to look quite fancy.
>>
>> One glaring omission in HtmlFormRenderer.java - there is no way to
>> specify a style for the layout table it contains. Otherwise, it's an
>> awesome piece of code.
>>
>> -Adrian
>>
>>
>